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This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 7th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Before we get into this weeks newsletter, I’d like to take a moment and recognise the loss of my grandmother, who passed away on the 24th, last month. She was a simple, thoughtful and kind woman, who raised a village. I miss her dearly. This was my eulogy to her. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 7th, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) The beginning is always today. — Mary Shelley The biggest obstacle to ultralearning is simply that most people don’t care enough about their own self-education to get started Finding Time for Ultra learning What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable ...

If Taleb convinced me that Mathematics was beautiful philosophy, Ben Orlin is the one made me fall in love with it. Change is the Only Constant is beautiful and funny at the same time. It’s the story of Calculus over the ages and through domains. It weaves through life and time, through people, interesting and otherwise. And the way Ben tells it, it bears no resemblance to the dry crap that is taught in schools and colleges. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but not paramount and still subject to the vagaries and complexities of life and nature. ...

Just the two popular ones here … Dickens writes such fluid prose here, I would quote the whole book. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. ...

In my youth, I came across the work of Robin Williams. No, not that one. She introduced me to the beauty of CRAP. And the fact that the PC is not a typewriter. But most of all, she introducted me to the beauty of type and design Fonts, and line spacing and kerning and everything else lovely, about the written word. And now if you want all that wisdom distilled, into a short, opinionated, beautiful web series, look no further than Matthew Butterick’s, Practical Typography. ...

Word for word, the most epigramatic book I have read. Short, sweet and beautiful words and lines and dialogue. Here’s a few. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. ...